


we shall dig graves for all that die in us

by gatheringbones



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-12
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 03:16:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2757530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatheringbones/pseuds/gatheringbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows more than she does of the gods, that much is clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we shall dig graves for all that die in us

**Author's Note:**

> i was really tremendously struck by the scene where solas removes lavellen’s clan tattoos and his reasoning behind it, and once everything sunk in i had to write this.

* * *

 

 

He knows more than she does of the gods, that much is clear.

What she knows is dear, as it is dear to all her people, but well does she know the price of history and the failures of fractured memory. He reveals her gods for what they are.

He calls her slave-marked.

She would tell him differently if he asked. She only knew them for what they were when they were given to her.

She would tell them that they meant that she was loved.

 

* * *

 

Her Keeper was old by then, and so frail that that the bones in her wrists and the veins in the backs of her hands stood out starkly against the tangles of faded ink. Her Keeper’s  _vallaslin_ scrawled down past her face to sweep across her collarbones and stretch all down the lengths of her arms. It was more than just the interlocking branches of Mythal and Elgar’nan- it was the Clan entire. Births and deaths and the names of all her children and all the paths they had walked.  _The Keeper keeps_ , she said, folding her hands around each other, branch and bird and halla and herb.  _I keep you all with me, no matter where you go._

It was her Keeper who held the needle; it was her Keeper who mixed the inks and spoke to her softly in the lambent darkness of the aravel, who smoothed the pads of her thumbs over the cheek of the youngest of her granddaughters and told her what she knew of the their wayward gods.

Her hand was steady. She would never allow it to be otherwise. She held her granddaughter’s face so that she would know how loved she was as she pricked the ink deep and dabbed away the blood.  _We have to carry it with us_ , she said.  _Our homes. Our stories. Our families_. She had stopped then, and then carefully pressed her dry paper lips to the corner of cheek not yet covered by the vines of Falon’din.  _This cannot be taken from you. It cannot be burned as a city can be burned. It cannot be leveled as a house can be leveled. They will look at you and know that you know the stories of your People._ Her eyes folded in on themselves in a nest of wrinkles. _They will know that your grandmother never had to chide you to sit still._

And her Keeper didn’t. Not even when the ink traveled to the surface of the lips and the tender, quivering place behind the ear, where a tiny coursing hound would lie coiled and dreaming. To protect you, said her grandmother, and that was all she would say, for this was for her granddaughter’s sake, not for an old woman’s bitter knowledge of how far her protection truly extended.

She was tired by then- she tired so easily- but her hands never wavered. She finished her task- the lines clean and strong and clear- and washed her granddaughter’s face so gently that there would not be so much as a scar or a scab to smudge her work.

Her Keeper would not live to see another of her grandchildren marked so. She would not live to once more set the faithful hound to guard the dreams of all her loved ones. She departed in spring like a sudden breath of wind stirring the sails of the aravels, and it was her children and grandchildren who washed and prepared her for burial. It was her youngest granddaughter who pressed both hands to the sides of her ancient face and kissed her just behind her ear, in the place where a small and sleeping hound lay with one ear pricked skywards as if listening from the Fade.

 

* * *

 

He does not touch her when he sits her down and lets the light play across his hands. He frames her instead, his long fingers stretched as if to encompass and sketch the whole of her.

She remembers her grandmother’s hands, she remembers how it hadn’t hurt when the ink had been put down- not really. For she had been well and truly loved when she had been thus marked, and nothing about that love could ever hurt her. There isn’t even really any true pain when he brings the light to bear on her face- just a sudden shocking cold, a  _wrenching_ cold that momentarily sears the thoughts from her head and makes her tongue feel thick and heavy and wrong in her mouth.

She comes back to herself- slowly, tentatively, feeling halla-skittish in the moment before she remembers where she is and what he has done- and when her thoughts return his hand is warm and steady on the back of her neck and his forehead pressed to hers. She is close enough to his individual eyelashes, long and heavy on his cheek. She is close enough to feel the heat rising from the collar of his woolen shirt, to see the pulse ticking slow and steady in his long and slender throat.

She thinks,  _He did not have to chide me to stay still_ , and feels a surge of something that cannot hurt, could never begin to hurt her because of how wrapped in love it is.

When he looks at her, the relief on his face blooms so fast that it hides what had been lingering there before, something she could not read.

He calls her beautiful. He says other things, in words even her grandmother didn’t know, the syllables falling soft and incomprehensible on her upturned face as he kisses her back to herself, his arms still loose around her as if reluctant to alight.

  


* * *

 

She is by herself when she discovers it. Alone, and still cold, still splintered all the way through with shards of coldness that bite deep and do not dab away the blood welling in their wake.

She relearns the topography of her face as she never has before.

She feels ashamed to be using a mirror so extensively for the first time she can remember. She feels ashamed to still feel as if she can’t keep track of what is going on around her, as if she is duller somehow- less bright, less worthy, less deserving of all that the women of Clan Lavellan had sought to instill in their daughters.

Falon’din is gone from her face, as well as the marks of the mother of halla. The branches of Mythal no longer curl above her brow, and Andruil’s blessing no longer follows the line of her jaw.

(She does not doubt that they were false. She does not doubt the blood soaked into the stones of the temple of Mythal, and she does not doubt the hard truths of empires. She does not doubthim, even now, even when pain pricks deeper than needles and echoes in the chambers of her heart.)

He has left elements behind. The ones she had added herself, long after the parting of her Keeper. Her first fumbling attempts at tattooing (for she had not had her grandmother’s skill at first, nor the eye and patience required to leave clean and steady lines) remain, as do the marks not related to the gods at all. The serpent at the hollow of her shoulder, the stark black lines to mark the years she spent learning what she needed to protect her people.

Her heart does not truly break until she discovers the extent of his work. Until she turns her head and holds back her ear to look at the space her grandmother had smoothed with her fingers once, lovingly, before bringing the needle forward and allowing the sleeping hound to take its shape.

It does hurt then.

It hurts, and it hurts, and there is nothing to wrap around it that will soften the edges and let it heal cleanly. The hurt is indelible, and goes deeper than skin; it goes deeper than she has ever been taught to withstand.

 

* * *

 


End file.
